S'pore's Sept non-oil domestic exports down 5.7% on-year

SINGAPORE: Singapore's non-oil domestic exports fell 5.7 per cent in September as compared to the same period last year, due to lower exports of both electronics and non-electronic products.

On a month-on-month seasonally adjusted basis, non-oil domestic exports fell 0.8 per cent.

Singapore's non-oil domestic exports to China, Indonesia, South Korea and Hong Kong grew, but those to other top markets such as the United States and European Union countries fell.

According to data from IE Singapore, domestic exports of electronic goods fell 11 per cent compared to last year. This was because of lower sales of consumer electronics, telecommunications equipment and disk drives.

Non-electronic exports were 1.9 per cent lower due to reduced exports of pharmaceuticals, disk media products, specialised machinery and metalworking machinery.

While the overall decline may not be as bad as feared, since some had forecast a 9 per cent drop in non-oil domestic exports in September, economists said the outlook is still a cloudy one.

David Cohen, economist, Action Economics, said: "The concern is that we haven't even seen the worst of it yet. The latest round of financial turmoil is going to weigh further on the global economy, contributing to what is now expected to be a trend of global downturn heading into 2009. And as a small trade dependent economy, Singapore will, of course, be very sensitive to that.

"The electronics continue declining year-on-year as it has been in recent months, and similarly, the pharmaceutical sector has been a bit of a disappointment after a double-digit growth last year. It has been declining year-on-year and there seems to be some shift in the focus of the activity.

"I still think, as far as the Singapore economy is concerned, the pharmaceutical sector represents an important area of growth for the economy going forward."

For now, the numbers show that the global downturn is hurting shipments from Singapore.

Exports to the US – Singapore's single-largest export market – have continued to be sluggish, down by 24.5 per cent in September from a year earlier. Shipments to the European Union fell by 23.6 per cent.

And looking ahead, economists are expecting the downward trend to continue.

"For the full year, we'll still end up with something in the region of a decline of 2 to 4 per cent for the non-oil domestic exports, which is what the government has been looking for... with clouds over the global economic outlook, it is probably going to see further declines in 2009," said Cohen.

Non-oil domestic exports account for about 70 per cent of Singapore's gross domestic product. The country's economy is already deemed to be in technical recession after posting two straight quarters of contraction.